Dottorato in INFORMATICA

Titolo della tesi: Non-malleable secret sharing against joint tampering attacks

Since thousands of years ago, the goal of cryptography has been to hide messages from prying eyes. In recent times, cryptography two important changes: first, cryptography itself evolved from just being about encryption to a broader class of situations coming from the digital era; second, the way of studying cryptography evolved from creating ``seemingly hard'' cryptographic schemes to constructing schemes which are provably secure. However, once the mathematical abstraction of cryptographic primitives started to be too hard to break, attackers found another way to defeat security. Side channel attacks have been proved to be very effective in this task, breaking the security of otherwise provably secure schemes. Because of this, recent trends in cryptography aim to capture this situation and construct schemes that are secure even against such powerful attacks. In this setting, this thesis specializes in the study of secret sharing, an important cryptographic primitive that allows to balance privacy and integrity of data and also has applications to multi-party protocols. Namely, continuing the trend which aims to protect against side channel attacks, this thesis brings some contributions to the state of the art of the so-called leakage-resilient and non-malleable secret sharing schemes, which have stronger guarantees against attackers that are able to learn information from possibly all the shares and even tamper with the shares and see the effects of the tampering. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold. First, we construct secret sharing schemes that are secure against a very powerful class of attacks which, informally, allows the attacker to jointly leak some information and tamper with the shares in a continuous fashion. Second, we study the capacity of continuously non-malleable secret sharing schemes, that is, the maximum achievable information rate. Roughly speaking, we find some lower bounds to the size that the shares must have in order to achieve some forms of non-malleability.